Shuja Khanzada

Shuja Khanzada (28 August 1943-16 August 2015) was the Home (Interior) Minister of Punjab from 2013 to 2015 under Pakistan. Khanzada was a colonel before later becoming a politician, and in 2015 he was killed in a Lashkar-e-Taiba suicide bombing.

Biography
Shuja Khanzada was born on 23 August 1943 to a Sunni Hanafi Muslim family, the Pashtun Yusufzai clan, in Shadikhan, Attock. He graduated from Islamia College in Peshawar in 1966 with a bachelor's degree in arts, but that year he was commissioned into the Pakistan Army and he fought in the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971 against India. He served as an instructor after the war, and from 1983 to 1985 he led the Pakistani 13th Lancers, an armored regiment of the army, in the Siachen Glacier conflict. From 1992 to 1994 he was appointed as an attache in Washington DC in the United States, and from the 1980s to the 1990s he was a field officer of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in Afghanistan and Balochistan.

In 1993, he retired from the military and entered Pakistani politics. He was a founder of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, a centrist Islamic democracy party, but he later joined the Pakistan Muslim League, a centre-right party. From 2002 to 2007 he was a member of the Provincial Assembly of Punjab and again from 2008 to 2013. Khanzada was elected as the Home (Interior) Minister of Punjab in 2013.

Death
During the Kashmir Conflict, the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist organization lost its leader Malik Ishaq to police gunfire on 29 July 2015 while he was trying to escape a prison convoy, so LeT decided to take revenge by killing Khanzada, influential in Punjabi politics as the head of the police. At his home office in Shadikan, a suicide bomber killed Khanzada and 18 others, succeeding in their mission. The United States offered to assist in the investigation of the suicide bombing the next day.